On the Ship

Me and my English teacher were thinking of a topic to write about and we came up with the idea of a small kid on a ship.

What's a prisom? Nobody wants to tell me. I was in the cabin bedroom on the bottom bunk reading a book, when I found a word I didn't know.

"Daddy, what's a prisom?"

"It's an object that has flat sides. Most of them are rectangles and..."

"Nope, you're wrong."

I ran out of the bedroom looking for an answer. Daddy was saying something else before I left, but I wasn't listening. When I was smaller, I had trouble running on the ship, but Daddy says I now have "Sea Legs". I got out to the deck of the ship and saw the sun setting. It was nice, but I didn't really care. Grownups like sunsets, but they get boring after a few seconds. Grownups seem to like boring things. I ran over to one of my friends who pulls the rope when we need to go. He was sitting on a barrel so I lifted myself onto another one near it.

"Mike, do you know what a prisom is?"

"Well...How should I put this? It's kind of a box, but it can have other shapes at..."

"No! That's what Daddy said!"

I thought these people were smart! I ran over to the kitchen and saw the cook chopping vegetables.

"Pierre!"

"Nora! What's wrong?"

"Nobody's telling me what a prisom is!"

I scrunched my face.

Pierre brought me a chair and we sat down.

"Where did you hear this word?"

"In my book. It said that the bad guy went to prisom."

"Oh! It's prison, not prisom."

"So what's prisom?"

"Well, it's a place that you have to be for a long time if you do something really bad."

"How long? Like all day?"

"It's more like years."

"Why would anyone need to stay in a place for so long?"

"Well, there are some bad things you can do, and people aren't very forgiving if you do something really bad."

"People aren't very nice then. How bad do you have to be to stay for years?"

"Well, stealing, hurting, and killing are the worst."

"What's killing?"

"Uhh...Well..." Pierre rubbed the back of his neck. "It's when one person makes another person die..."

"Die?"

"Umm...I need to go back to work."

And now I have another question...